What did Sulpicius know?

The literary criticism of classical texts, as is well known, operates according to a general principle of maximal charity: apparent errors, obscurities and infelicities can all be recouped as deliberate inconcinnities designed to cause specific effects. That principle is inevitably tested in this case. Sulpicius is a liminal figure. We cannot expect him to operate with the same level of sophistication as an adult Oppian or Dionysius Periegetes; but nor, conversely, can we deny his ambition to join that class. Reading this poem thus becomes a test not just of our skill as interpreters but also of the epistemic security of the parameters of conventional criticism. How much charity should we extend to the boy poet? How much knowledge can we presume for him? How much sophistication? If, what is more, conventional literary criticism presumes a bond of complicity, trust and camaraderie with the authors we study (for to impute sophistication and knowingness to poets is to arrogate the same to ourselves as critics), to what extent is that bond stretched and distorted when our dialogue partner is a child?

Poetic sophistication is the result of the interplay of manifold factors, including temperament, zeal and capacity. Fundamental, however, is technique, which comes only with learning and experience. Sulpicius was brilliant for his age, but inevitably he was not the finished article. In this first part of the discussion I consider three areas in which his technical skill can be assessed. As we move through them, assessment becomes increasingly difficult. First, and easiest, is metrics. It is not just that the poem is highly competent, it also displays neoteric features that can be read as signs of sophistication. Three statistics are particularly indicative: 77% (33/43) of the lines employ the trochaic caesura favoured by imperial poets; 65% feature the bucolic dieresis (28/43); and there is a high incidence (4 in total, just under 10%) of fifth-foot spondees (characteristic of late-Hellenistic avant-gardism).Footnote ³ Metrics are a matter of rules, and hence relatively easy to assess: Sulpicius was clearly adept, well drilled and of his era.

My second area, style, is trickier: there are no hard-and-fast criteria here. Analysts of imperial poetry have tended to rely on Wifstrand’s account, which diagnoses the degree of innovation against the template of traditional poetics (from the ‘Homeric-Apollonian’, at one end of the spectrum, to the ‘Alexandrian’ at the other).Footnote ⁴ Thus for example Quintus of Smyrna is a strikingly ‘traditional’ poet in comparison with Triphiodorus;Footnote ⁵ ps.-Oppian ramps up the experimentalism of his predecessor Oppian; Nonnus can be seen as the non plus ultra of ‘Alexandrianism’.Footnote ⁶

Sulpicius seems to have had at his fingertips a number of short phrases adapted from traditional hexameter verse, which were specific to a given sedes in the line; rehearsing these was no doubt an important part of his preparation for public improvisation. Crucially, these phrases are relatively banal, recurrent phrases that could be dropped into a poem on almost any mythological topic.Footnote ⁷ For example, θεοὶ ποίησαν after the trochaic caesura in line 2 is found twice in the Odyssey (17.271, 23.258);Footnote ⁸ the final πυρὸς ἀκ<α>μάτοιο (7) adapts the common Homeric line-end formula ἀκάματον πῦρ (Il. 5.4, 15,731 etc.); in line 19, Helios is invited to lament his son’s λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον, a Homeric phrase (found in the same sedes at Od. 3.93, 4.323, 14.90); Διὸς νόον (21) is both Homeric and Hesiodic, used formulaically after the trochaic caesura (Il. 8.143, 14.160 etc.); Ζηνὸς νόον (40) is found in Hesiod (Op. 661; fr. 43a.52 MW, both in the same sedes), and in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (36, different sedes); initial ἔρχεο νῦν at 27 is also Homeric (Il. 15.54, 221; cf. Od. 10.320, 402); μέγαν οὐρανὸν in 36 might look to a solitary usage (in the same sedes) at Il. 1.497, although the phrase is unremarkable. Sulpicius’ οὐ μὰ γὰρ αὐτὴν/Ῥείην ἄλλο τ[ι τ]οῦδε κακώτερον ἶδεν Ὄλυμπος (22), seems to adapt, again non-allusively, such unremarkable Homeric phrases as οὐ γὰρ ἐγώ γέ τί φημι κακώτερον ἄλλο (Od. 8.138; cf. 15.343, Il. 19.321).

Sulpicius’ traditional material is also, however, intercut with non-traditional language; the contrast gives the poem a feel of stylistic modernity.Footnote ⁹ This is evident from the very first line’s φαεσφόρον ἁρμελατῆρα: φαεσφόρος is not found in epic before the Hellenistic period,Footnote ¹⁰ and ἁρμελατήρ is apparently a Sulpician coinage. The half-line ἐπ’ ἀψίδεσσιν Ὀλύμπου (bis: 3, 33) uses the Homeric hapax ἁψίς (Il. 5.487, of the loop of a net) in the post-Homeric sense of a ‘vault’. πρηυμενῆ (40) is an otherwise unparalleled Ionic form of a word (πρευμενής) elsewhere largely confined to tragedy. Sulpicius thus balances traditional phrasing with more contemporary stylistic and metrical features. On the Wifstrand scale, he registers as a moderate Alexandrian. What is striking for our purposes is that he has learned at such a young age both to use traditional language to display his learning and to use innovations to stamp the poem with a distinctive poetic identity.

This is not to say that he has fully mastered poetic expression (another facet of style). Here we venture into much more subjective territory: what one reader perceives as clumsy opacity, another may in principle register as grandiosity. All the same, we can note a number of features that seem awkward or redundant. In the second line, Zeus notes the responsibility vested in Helios by the gods: they have made ‘none other than you’ (οὐχ ἕτερον πλὴν σεῖο) the charioteer of the cosmos. The phrase is seemingly pleonastic (Zeus simply means no more than ‘you’), ungainly and unparalleled in high poetry (where ἄλλος is regular in such expressions). οὐ τάδε πιστὰ θεοῖς σέο δήνεα (6) is bumpy Greek, which seems to mean ‘these plans of yours are not faithful to the gods’ (but πιστός in this sense is elsewhere used of people). The sentence at 25–6 (πώλων γὰρ ἀπείριτον οὐ σθένος ἔγνω/ῥυτήρων οὐδ’ ἔσχε πολυφραδὲς ἔργον ἀνύσσαι) should mean ‘he did not know the enormous strength of your foals/Nor could he achieve a famous deed with the reins’, but the position of conjunctive οὐδ’ obscures the fact that ῥυτήρων belongs in the second clause.Footnote ¹¹ Lines 29–30 (μούνῳ σοὶ πυρόεντος ἐπειγομένῳ κύκλοιο/ἀντολίη καὶ πᾶσα καλὸς δρόμος ἔπλετο δυσμή mean ‘To you alone as you yearn for your fiery cycle/Is vowed the rising and – a fine chase! – every setting.’ The phrase καλὸς δρόμος is best taken as a parenthetic interjection,Footnote ¹² but it is odd phrasing, and to describe the setting as a δρόμος is odder still. πᾶσα seems to have been added for the sole purpose of filling out the hexameter. Also difficult is 37, ἥμισυ μὲν γαίης νέρθεν, τὸ δ’ ὕπερθε τανύσσας, of the sun’s course. To my eye ἥμισυ μὲν … τὸ δ’ must mean ‘half of the time … the rest of the time’, and νέρθεν is prepositional, governing γαίης (as in the Homeric phrase that is borrowed here).Footnote ¹³ Others, however, have taken νέρθεν as adverbial and ἥμισυ as quasi-prepositional, meaning ‘half-way between’.Footnote ¹⁴ Garcia Barraco, meanwhile, takes each of ἥμισυ, νέρθεν and ὕπερθε to refer to positions in relation to the earth.Footnote ¹⁵ The natural response is to take these difficulties as signs of overreach by the young poet: in straining for metrical sophistication and a blend of traditionalism and innovation, he has sacrificed clarity for technical ostentation. This assessment seems to me plausible. But is there a double standard at work here? When such interpretative challenges present themselves in Pindar, Aeschylus, Callimachus or some other canonically ‘difficult’ poet, are we not likely to speak not of ineptitude but of sublime poetic intensity?Footnote ¹⁶ Are we perhaps too charitable to ‘difficult’ poets?

The picture painted so far is of a poet with a good technical command of metre and both traditional and neoteric language, who perhaps – though this is more subjective – struggled intermittently to write clear Greek within the constraints of the hexameter. This picture is (further) complicated, however, when we turn to my third category, allusivity. An ability to invoke and work creatively with the great poets of the past was of course de rigueur for postclassical poets, both Latin and Greek. At first sight Sulpicius shows little capacity in this regard. In the 150 years since its rediscovery, the poem has received extensive discussion in relation to the evolution of the Phaethon tradition and perceived allusions to earlier texts.Footnote ¹⁷ Modern studies have often begun from the poem’s supposed relationship with Ovid Met. 2.238–9, where Jupiter is said to have spoken unspecified words of both apology and threat to Helios after he had thunderblasted his errant son (missos quoque Iuppiter ignes/excusat precibusque minas regaliter addit).Footnote ¹⁸ It is possible, as Döpp has suggested, that the topic of Sulpicius’ poem was prompted by Ovid’s reticence (just as e.g. Homeristae set themselves the challenge of expanding Homeric passages that were deemed elliptical).Footnote ¹⁹ However, even if it was Ovid who inspired the theme, that does not mean that Sulpicius himself knew the Metamorphosis directly: the topic for these ‘improvised verses’ (versus extemporales), as the accompanying Latin inscription describes them, was surely chosen not by the poet but by the organisers of the competition.Footnote ²⁰

This point matters, because it is often argued that Sulpicius derived his source material from Ovid.Footnote ²¹ It is not per se implausible that a Greek poet of the late first century CE should have read Ovid: recent critics have been much more open towards Latin influence on imperial Greek literature.Footnote ²² Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, in any case, is surely likely to have been a Latin speaker (the inscription also carries a Latin prose epitaph). The issue is rather that none of the evidence that has been presented is compelling. Even advocates of Ovidian influence have come close to admitting this: ‘Für sich genommen, hätten diese Berührungen noch kein sonderliches Gewicht’ writes Döpp, appealing instead to cumulative evidence.Footnote ²³ But how many unconvincing individual examples does it take to build a convincing cumulative case? In the interests of economy, let us offer just one illustration of the kind of supposed parallel that has been advanced. Sulpicius 12b–13 (‘and a farmer, standing beside his sickles, bewailed the monstrous dryness of the land’)Footnote ²⁴ has been compared to Met. 2.237–9a, where the Nymphs weep for the desiccation of their water-sources.Footnote ²⁵ But there are no verbal similarities, and even the contexts are different; all the two passages have in common is the idea of desiccation, an obvious consequence of the solar chariot crashing to earth. Ovid is, ultimately, a red herring when it comes to the details of Sulpicius’ poem. The myth of Phaethon was very well known in antiquity, and will have existed in many different versions. It is simple misfortune that the Metamorphoses offers the only extended version of the story from the time before Sulpicius; we should not lend disproportionate weight to that fact.Footnote ²⁶ The widespread belief that Sulpicius had Ovid at his fingertips tells us less about Sulpicius than about scholars’ tendency to apply the charity principle overzealously, and their desire to connect disparate points on the landscape.

Sulpicius may or may not have read Ovid – we will never know – but he certainly does not engage with him allusively. There are no moments where knowledge of Ovid enriches our reading of Sulpicius (or indeed vice versa). Allusivity is more than the manipulation of source material: it is a sophisticated, higher-level technique generating extra resonance between two or more texts. Crucially, this is a skill that Sulpicius does not appear to have fully absorbed: I have found only occasional moments where Sulpicius might seem to be working in creative dialogue with the original text. One example is the phrase ἔρχεο νῦν (27), which (as mentioned above) is Homeric in origin. In two of the four Homeric usages (Iliad 15.54, 221) it is uttered by Zeus: Sulpicius may, then, have chosen the phrase on the grounds that it is characteristic of the king of the gods. Iliad 15.54, what is more, is arguably contextually relevant: here the god chides Hera for her deception of him, just as in Sulpicius he chides Helios. How do we decide if this is an allusion or not? On the positive side, there is a relatively close fit between the two passages, and we may wish to see Sulpicius as deliberately linking Zeus’ speech of reproach to a famous precedent. On the other hand, ἔρχεο νῦν is a banal phrase that hardly pops out of its context: one would have to know Homer’s text exceptionally well to recognise this as an allusion. Once again, Sulpicius’ youth and inexperience significantly problematise the claim: can we trust him to have this level of recondite knowledge, and moreover to assume it in his audience? Is it not more likely that he had it to hand as one of a number of traditional-sounding phrases that he had memorised?

An interestingly different case is line 37, ἥμισυ μὲν γαίης νέρθεν, τὸ δ’ ὕπερθε τανύσσας (of the sun’s course: the meaning of this line was discussed above). This looks very close to Galen’s paraphrase of a dictum he attributes to Pindar: καὶ τὰ τῆς γῆς νέρθεν καὶ τὰ ὕπερθε τοῦ οὐρανοῦ κατὰ Πίνδαρον ἐπισκοπεῖ (Adhortatio ad artes 1). Maehler reconstructs the Pindaric line as τᾶ<ς> τε γᾶς ὑπένερθε … οὐρανοῦ θ’ ὕπερ (fr. 292), which lessens the similarity to Sulpicius’ line – but of course the reconstruction is entirely speculative. Did Sulpicius know a Pindaric original? It seems prima facie highly unlikely that the obscurer parts of the Pindaric corpus were among his bedtime reading. More plausible is the possibility that the prose paraphrase reported by Galen was in circulation as an apophthegm, and that Sulpicius has picked up on this. Ultimately, however, we find ourselves entirely in the dark: it is just as plausible that the similarity is entirely coincidental.

By far the strongest case for allusion comes at 12–16. As Vérilhac first noted, it reworks a famous passage of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter:Footnote ²⁷

Not only is the phrasing notably close (especially in the underlined parts),Footnote ²⁸ but the situation as a whole is exactly comparable, both passages dealing with scenes of god-induced environmental disaster. Given the similarities, it seems plausible that Sulpicius had this passage firmly in mind when he composed, and knowingly aligned the two, to enhance the sense of cosmic catastrophe. Sulpicius’ explicit mention of Demeter even seems to cue the allusion to the Homeric Hymn. Might the striking expression σπόρος ἐς Δήμητρα even be an ‘Alexandrian footnote’ (to risk that overused but still valuable phrase)? The transmitted title for the Hymn is ὕμνοι (sic) εἰς τὴν Δήμητραν: Sulpicius and his readers may well have known it simply as εἰς (/ ἐς) (τὴν) Δήμητρα(ν). In that case σπόρος ἐς Δήμητρα might mean, at the meta-level, ‘the seed [from which this section of the poem grew] is the Hymn to Demeter’.Footnote ²⁹ But are we prepared to tolerate this level of quasi-Callimachean sophistication in a poem that otherwise shows only the faintest trace of allusivity? Once again, the answer will depend on how much knowledge and knowingness we are prepared to grant Sulpicius. And once again that question rebounds onto the critic. Can we bring ourselves to deny sophistication to an ancient poetic text when the opportunity presents itself? Or, conversely, do we want to risk the charge of overreading, of overinvesting—of overextending our interpretative charity?Footnote ³⁰

What did Sulpicius mean?

I turn now to the second part of my discussion: what deeper meaning, if any, did the poem have? The poem is a versified ethopoeia, of a form familiar to students of ancient rhetoric,Footnote ³¹ i.e. an imaginative recreation of the words of a given mythological or historical figure in a given situation. Such exercises were both set for advanced school students and indulged in by established literary writers (we have numerous examples composed by, for example, Libanius and Severus of Alexandria in later antiquity). The genre provided the expertise that underpinned second-sophistic declamation, and by extension the direct-speech sections of genres such as the novel and epic.

It is easy to assume that a given ethopoeia is simply a self-contained technical exercise with no wider significance. Recent scholarship on imperial declamation, however, encourages us to read more imaginatively, and more contextually. In particular, William Guast has argued for declamation as ‘a vivid medium, in that it restages history live and in a “controversial” format’.Footnote ³² For Guast, declamation – in effect, as we have seen, an expanded, stylised version of the ethopoeia – gained its point and purpose from its capacity simultaneously to create an alternative imaginative space and to create a forum for rehearsing and exploring ideas that had contemporary purchase: ‘declamation’s distance from the world is one of the reasons it is such an attractive medium for thinking about the world’.Footnote ³³

As Alessandra Manieri has argued, the Phaethon story will have been politically resonant in the context of the festival for Jupiter Capitolinus, particularly given the assimilation of the dominus et deus Domitian to the king of the gods, the cosmic imagery so favoured by Flavian propaganda and the widespread association in the era of Phaethon with imperial misrule.Footnote ³⁴ Manieri begins from the position that it is categorically impossible that Sulpicius’ poem could have contained any criticism of the emperor,Footnote ³⁵ and argues that the poem points instead optimistically to the imperial future. It is certainly possible to read the text this way, with Domitian in the role of the mighty guarantor of cosmic order.Footnote ³⁶ The contents, after all, highlight the authoritative nature of Zeus’ locutions: it transitions from the reproachful questions of 3–8, through statements about the effects of Phaethon’s actions (9–18), to the imperatives that represent most of the rest of the poem (μύρεο … ἔχε, 19; γίνωσκ’, 21; οἰχέσθω … κεῦθε, 24; ἔρχεο … ἐποίχεο, 27; φείδεο, 32; ἴσχε, 33; μαίεο, 34; ὅδευε, 36). There are numerous mentions of Olympian power and force that can do double-duty as political allegories (θεοὶ … ἄνακτες, 2; ἐπαρωγήν, 5; θρόνον … ἐμόν, 8; the thunderbolt alluded to at 18 and 20). The recurrent emphasis on Zeus’ νόος might also suggest imperial will (21, 31, 40).

The Capitoline Games were of course propagandistic, and this environment could very well have steered audiences towards Manieri’s reading. It is, however, in the nature of mythical allegory that it is unstable and multivalent. As Shadi Bartsch argued over thirty years ago, this was particularly the case in the first century CE, which saw an explosion in ‘doublespeak’, whereby readers and audiences repeatedly sought and found subversive and counter-ideological meanings, particularly in representations of myth and history.Footnote ³⁷ Rather than reading Sulpicius’ poem with Manieri as a simple political allegory, we might embrace Pramit Chaudhuri’s analysis of the politics and poetics of theomachic myth in the Domitianic era (for the Phaethon story is a version of a theomachy), and move ‘away from allegory and subversive criticism to the domain of interdiscursivity’.Footnote ³⁸ The figure of the battler of gods, he argues, ‘is a sign with multiple, and shifting, referents: he can be a serious and principled opponent, or a rough and ignorant brute’.Footnote ³⁹ If we follow this lead, then it becomes less than self-evident that the poem celebrates Zeus’ authority and his restoration of cosmic order. Might it be seen, rather, to expose the callousness and proprietorial arrogance of the king of the gods, as he revels in his extra-judicial murder of the young rebel (ἐγὼ πυρὶ φέγγος ἀπέσβεσα, 18), denies the father the opportunity to grieve (μηκέτι παιδὸς/μύρεο λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον, 18–19) and lays claim to sole ownership of the cosmos (ἡμετέρου κόσμοιο, 1; κόσμος ἐμὸς, 23)?

What is more, there is nothing that requires the association of Domitian with Zeus in the myth. Audience members might, alternatively, have read Phaethon instead as Domitian, and Zeus’ chastisement as an indictment of the ‘malign’ (κακόφρονα, 3; κακόφρονος, 17) ruler, who has instituted the worst of all governments (οὐ μὰ γὰρ αὐτὴν/Ῥείην ἄλλο τι τοῦδε κακώτερον ἶδεν Ὄλυμπος, 21–2). As Manieri notes, a passage in Dio’s Kingship Orations implicitly associates Phaethon precisely with Domitian, in the context of praise of Trajan.Footnote ⁴⁰ On this interpretation, Helios’ εὐσταθὲς ἅρμα (7) symbolises the imperial power that Vespasian foolishly bequeathed his son. In sum: rather than functioning as a static allegory, the myth creates a fluid space into which current issues of power and order can be transposed, and where they can be explored from different angles that generate different interpretations. To paraphrase Guast, it is the very distance of the mythical world from the contemporary that legitimises its use for complex, experimental purposes.

Yet how plausible a reading of the poem is this? We must question – by now a familiar point – how likely it is that an 11-year-old boy devised any kind of political allegory, let alone a sophisticated, multifaceted one with a latent anti-Domitianic ‘edge’. We might argue instead that it was the myth itself that was politicised, not Sulpicius’ particular version of it, and that themes of regal power and subversion are inevitably packaged into this narrative. On this interpretation, any political overtones the audience detected in the poem will have been generated by the context rather than the poem itself.

The capacity of contexts to generate interpretative frames was spectacularly dramatised when the poem was relocated from the Capitoline Games to the commemorative altar after its author’s death. In this new context, the story became a sorrowful lament over the death of a precocious boy who died before his time.Footnote ⁴¹ Valentina Garulli in particular has written insightfully on the ingenious ways in which the funeral monument reinterprets the poem in sepulchral terms.Footnote ⁴² But this discussion as a whole might well lead us to wonder how much ‘meaning’ there actually is in the poem ‘itself’. Is it then simply a coat stand, on which readers, audiences and critics choose to hang their own preferred interpretations? Here we come close to the reception-orientated perspective championed by Martindale and others in the 1990s.Footnote ⁴³ The difference is that Martindale believed it was a particular property of only the very best literature that it could reinsert itself meaningfully into new interpretative contexts: this was a sign of its distinctive textural richness and thematic complexity. In Sulpicius’ case, by contrast, it is the very presumed naivety of the author that leads us to question whether there is anything at all ‘there’ in the text. The bleakest conclusion is that this poem is simply the work of a child learning how to mimic how the adults play: it has no deeper signification at all. It can sustain multiple different interpretations because in itself it contains none. But this conclusion has wider implications. If we also accept that Sulpicius’ poem responds as well as any other to political interpretation, where does that leave the political interpretation of poetry as a whole? What criteria can we use to decide when a subtext is there and when it is not? How confident can we be that any given poet is playing the same game as we critics?

What were Sulpicius’ words?

As was mentioned in Section 1 above, there are a number of points in the poem where the meaning is unclear. In this section I consider those cases where emendation in the light of parallels from other imperial Greek poets may help. As with the discussion above, however, any conclusions must remain tentative, and will depend on how much skill we are prepared to grant the boy-poet. We should be particularly cautious about changing an inscribed text, which survives (except where it is damaged) in exactly the same form in which it was created. Any emendation of the legible text must presuppose that errors were introduced in the process of transcription or transmission of the oral text, or in the carving. This is not per se implausible. It has been accepted since the poem was first published that there are a number of errors on the stone, usually consisting in the omission of one or two letters (I have accepted and indicated these editorial ‘corrections’ in my own text printed in the appendix). These cases are almost certainly not Sulpicius’ own errors: it is hard to believe, for example, that the poet himself wrote σὺ σὸς ἔφυ at 25 (editions read οὐ, surely correctly). But clearly when it comes to more substantial changes to the text we must tread very carefully. The urge to restore a perfect, pristine text – the text, in other words, that we as critics would want to read – should always be interrogated.

I focus on four cases of difficulty in the received text, as given in IGUR 1336 (= Moretti Reference Moretti1979: 189–93). Firstly, lines 36–7:

ἔδευε is legible on the stone at the end of 36.Footnote ⁴⁴ Visconti’s correction ὅδευε, however, is supported by the very close parallel of the line-end of Orphic Hymn 64.5 (to Nomos): … μέγαν οὐρανὸν αὐτὸς ὁδεύει. It may indeed be that the author of the Orphic Hymn borrows directly from Sulpicius, given the near-identity of the two phrases (there is no other instance of this phrasing in extant Greek),Footnote ⁴⁵ and indeed the fact that αὐτός is pointed in Sulpicius (Zeus wants Helios to take personal responsibility) but redundant in the Orphic Hymn. Sulpicius has in this case built his phrasing carefully: he replicates a Homeric phrase in the same sedes (ἠερίη δ’ ἀνέβη μέγαν οὐρανὸν Οὔλυμπόν τε, Il. 1.497), and after dropping in the colourless αὐτός completes the line with a part of ὁδεύω, a hapax in Homer (ὁδεύειν at Il. 11.569, also at line-end). ὁδεύειν (always, again, at line-end) begins to be used from the first century CE onwards by poets of the sun’s course (a use not found in earlier poetry).Footnote ⁴⁶

Another case in which the inscribed text may be faulty is arguably the most difficult passage in the poem, and has already been cited:

ἄπλατον is certainly the reading on the stone, although the circumstances are suspicious. As mentioned above, the majority of the poem is written out continuously on the two columns flanking the portrait of the boy. AΠΛA finishes the bottom of the left-hand column; ΤΟΝ is inscribed anomalously below it, in larger letters and in isolation from the rest of the script. As things stand, ἀζαλέην must be read as an adjectival noun (‘parched field’), with ἄπλατον (‘monstrous’) as the qualifying adjective.Footnote ⁴⁷ Quite apart from the orthographic oddities of the text, ἄπλατον is impossible to construe (and in any case ἄπλητος is the regular epic form). Sauppe tentatively suggested emending to ἄμαλλαν (‘crop’).Footnote ⁴⁸ I suggest ἄρουραν, on the basis of Nonnus Dion. 13.374–5: … οἵ τε ῥόον Χρεμέταο καὶ οἳ παρὰ Κίνυφος ὕδωρ/ᾤκεον ἀζαλέης ψαμαθώδεα πέζαν ἀρούρης.Footnote ⁴⁹ Sulpicius (I suggest) and Nonnus have taken the Homeric ἄρουρα, very common at the line-end,Footnote ⁵⁰ and qualified it with ἀζαλέος, which is certainly found intermittently in Homer, but gained considerably in popularity in the Hellenistic period as a recondite adjective.Footnote ⁵¹ How the familiar noun ἄρουραν might have become corrupted into ἄπλατον, on the other hand, is inexplicable, both palaeographically and cognitively.

A Nonnian parallel may also help with line 9:

Visconti and Henzen read ἀπειλῆς; it was Ciofi and Sauppe who (independently?) suggested ἀπ’ εἴλης, which is read in modern editions.Footnote ⁵² This is ingenious, but to my mind implausible. Even with the accentual distinction, it is hard to imagine an audience picking out the recondite word εἴλη in oral performance (let alone on an inscription without interpunctual space).Footnote ⁵³ Sulpicius’ vocabulary is occasionally ambitious but never obscurantist. ἄχθος ἀπειλῆς, on the other hand, finds a close parallel in Nonnus’ metrically identical line-end formula ὄγκον ἀπειλῆς (Dion. 8.408, 16.27, 17.318). ἀπειλή regularly means ‘threatening circumstance’ in imperial Greek, both prose and verse; Sulpicius’ ὑπερμενὲς ἄχθος ἀπειλῆς would therefore mean ‘a mighty, weighty menace’. And once again we see the same technique at work: ἄχθος appears in its Homeric position in the line,Footnote ⁵⁴ which is then completed by a word used in a non-Homeric sense. The result is a striking, extravagant expression.

Finally, at line 20 Zeus warns Helios not to shirk his duties in the future with a threat:

ἀθροίσῃς – Visconti’s transcription, which has made its way into modern editions via Cougny – cannot mean ‘get’ (i.e. ‘be hit by’). The middle parts of the word are in fact not fully readable. ΑΘΡ is visible on the right-hand side of one row, and ΣΗΣ at the start of the left-hand row beginning the next line; but the letters following ΑΘΡ curve around the ridge that frames the right-hand column, and are not clear. Sauppe proposed ἀείσῃς (or at least an unspecified form of ἀείδω), and Kaibel ἀθρήσῃς. Kaibel’s ἀθρήσῃς seems to me far preferable. There is in this case no strong parallel that I can find for the phrasing, but we clearly need an equivalent of Homeric ἵν’ εἰδῇς/ὄφρ’ εἰδῇς. In Lucian’s 24th Dialogue of the Gods (which has been argued to show knowledge of Sulpicius’ poem),Footnote ⁵⁵ Zeus threatens Helios if he allows another to take his solar chariot: αὐτίκα εἴσῃ, ὁπόσον τοῦ σοῦ πυρὸς ὁ κεραυνὸς πυρωδέστερος (Luc. Dial. D. 24.2). A verb of seeing is of course a ready substitute for a verb of knowing (cf. ἶδεν at line 22 of our poem). ἀθρέω in this extended sense (‘witness’, ‘come to see’, i.e. ‘realise’) is again Nonnian, especially in similarly minatory contexts.Footnote ⁵⁶

These readings seem credible to me, and have been incorporated into the revised text printed in the appendix. They are, however, subject to the same uncertainties that I have raised throughout. Philologists like to assume that errors and difficulties are introduced in the process of textual transmission alone, and that behind them lies a hypothetical original free from blemish (a different manifestation of the same principle of maximal charity). This is clearly not the case with Sulpicius, who was perfectly capable of writing garbled and tortuous Greek without the need for outside aid. My method above has involved, as is traditional in textual criticism, appealing to parallels, from the Orphic Hymns and Nonnus’ Dionysiaca. But whether these sophisticated (and later) texts are appropriate comparanda for the boy poet is, naturally, an open question.